session 3

In Session 3 of the course, we took a step back somewhat from the deeply reflexive account on critiques of knowledge production in the social sciences that marked the first 2 sessions, to go back, as Prof. Gadagkar put it, to the ‘primer’ of a disciplinary activity that is a necessary first step to instituting any dialogue between disciplines. As he emphasized, the point of even reflexive activity is lost on the listener if the starting points and contexts are simply not known. And not knowing about knowledge-producing activity in other disciplines is the surest way to the ‘othering’ that follows – the assumption that knowledge-production does not happen at all in these other fields. It is to dispel these assumptions and challenge this attitude that Prof. Gadagkar proposed, at the outset, a sharing of information, as he set out to talk in some detail about the ‘how’ of his research activity, before embarking on a fuller discussion of the ‘why’ – why knowledge production proceeds in the ways that it does and with the particular objects of enquiry in the discipline/ field.

Prof. Gadagkar works with an insect. One of the reasons why such study could be fascinating, he averred, is that many species of non-human animals live in societies with organizational patterns very similar to humans and with more efficiency sometimes; more so many species of insects. They live in groups, they have strong bonds of recognition, they have division of labour – in building homes, finding food, rearing offspring - they communicate, they have co-operation and conflict. Lives of such insects – which are commonly found and not exotic – and Prof. Gadagkar did wish to make a point about anthropology here – could also be interesting simply for human beings as social beings too. Prof. Gadagkar went on to describe these insect lives with 2 running sub-themes – how to understand an insect society, and why we should bother to do this, and he attempted to do this with the minimum of disciplinary jargon. Prof. Gadagkar proposed this as the thing to do to initiate dialogue between disciplines in the first place. Following on a description of the life styles and choices of these insects, which makes these societies worth studying, Prof. Gadagkar went on to talk about the methodologies of this study. One of the first steps of this exercise would be as value-neutral a description as possible, for instance of various kinds of behaviour as a possible guide to personality [and this recalled some of the questions that came up in the last session on the point of description in methodology of the natural and social sciences]. This constitutes a quantitative study of behaviour, which is of course riddled with the pitfalls of taking into account only what we find interesting. We might however try to see if there is a pattern to behaviour, and if it has connections with the division of labour. Prof. Gadagkar went into a fascinating discussion thereafter of queen behaviour in paper wasps, the complete absence of violence in both her behaviour and her interactions with other members of the nest, and the general difficulty of finding evidences of conflict among nest-mates. He also told us how observation alone could not bring the evidence required to prove or disprove this hypothesis, and manipulation, or in-vitro situations, might be required to do the same. Devising experiments, and interpreting findings in the light of these manipulations is part of this exercise. This then is a way of asking a question of this society and designing a way to find an answer, and this touches upon the long debate of whether pristine observation is more desirable as the best way to find explanations, or even possible. The long discussion on queen behaviour as meek, potential queen behaviour as nasty in the absence of the queen, were all designed to point to the apparent presence of enormous co-operation, and almost complete absence of conflict in this society, and the question of whether conflict were indeed truly absent here. The division of reproductive labour between the workers and the queen in paper wasps is particularly interesting from the evolutionary point of view, and it is here that the absence of conflict too is intriguing. Is it true that her earlier aggression won acceptance from every other member of the nest? But how then does she maintain the condition, inhibit the workers from developing their reproductive apparatus? Here Prof. Gadagkar talked about how previous research and its findings could be usefully employed, and differently, to find answers to new questions. It is the case that different insect societies are classified into ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ societies, where physical aggression is a feature of queen behaviour in the former (both to inhibit worker reproduction and to make workers work) and not the latter. Advanced societies are really large and probably aggression is not useful behaviour to control the workers. Rather they seem to use a chemical weapon that ‘sterilizes’ the workers from developing their ovaries. But the paper wasp is a ‘primitive’ society. However, the queen is found here to use such a chemical weapon, and experiments designed with as effective controls as possible can demonstrate this. The experiment ultimately demonstrated that Ropalidia marginata queens appear to use a non-volatile pheromone beyond the first week of her life to inhibit worker reproduction. This led to a further question about how the queen regulates the non-reproductive activities of the workers. A speculative hypothesis based on conditions in advanced societies that it might be a ‘police force’ other than the queen (as in advanced societies) that does this, was helped along with the help of another series of observations that gave a series of mild associations. Experiments designed helped prove this somewhat more.

All of this gave an impression of more and more order, and no conflict. Is it limited to the first week in the life of the queen? Is this an index of conflict? Experiments and observations both denied this hypothesis. Is it then possible that this increased level of aggression in the first week is needed by the queen to boost her own physiology? This unlikely hypothesis was now entertained. Designed experiments proved this. Even in matters of queen succession, there appeared to be no conflict.

In the latter part of the session, Prof. Gadagkar concentrated on a question to which answers had not been found. The question is – who becomes the next queen? How is this decided? Can this be predicted? Observations and experiments failed to provide answers to these questions. Rather it was found that the potential queen is not unique by any means – either by behaviour, position in dominance hierarchy, or otherwise. Another question would be – do the wasps know who the heir designate is? This hypothesis actually was proved by experiments which looked for, and found, the logical consequence of such a hypothesis.

Which led us to the researchers’ success in finding examples of conflict – in inter-colony interaction. It was found through experiments that nestmates could be recognized and accepted, non-nestmates were not tolerated, even under laboratory conditions, young non-nestmates were better tolerated, admitted freely into the nest, old aliens were attacked if they came near the nest, the alien queen was attacked and dismembered. The resultant findings were that there was not evidence of intra-colony kin discrimination – war with insiders is not possible; war with outsiders is high. It is this dual strategy that accounts for the ecological dominance of insect societies, making them super-organisms.

Prof. Gadagkar went on to introduce the comparison to human beings, asking what we can learn from insect societies. There is of course a great tendency to make this comparison, but Prof. Gadagkar preferred to ask this question formally. He answered that the reason to make this study might be similar to why an anthropologist studies primitive human societies. He made it clear that imitating nature, or asking it for decisions, was not the point. The point rather, was to turn to nature to decide how to do something that we have already decided upon. Insect societies may help, too, to reflect on our own societies, in the ways that they do not do what we do, or do it differently from us.

Prof. Gadagkar went on to invite reflections on why we might study insect societies. In the discussion that followed, he was asked why he went to such great lengths to look for conflict. Prof. Gadagkar responded with the situation in other insect species where conflict is high, and the other perspective – human – from which absence of conflict seemed nearly absurd. Further questions related to the mandate and methodology of anthropology itself – the tendency towards processual study and if some of these insights would be taken into the study of insect societies. These discussions also suggested that while anthropology itself had moved from the study of the primitive to the study of the everyday, and thereby assumed a withdrawal from the ethical dilemmas of studying difference, sometimes necessitating a withdrawal from the cognitive encounter altogether, the suggestions implicit in the work presented might well propose a return to boldness in knowledge-making, realizing that failure was bound to be a part, and also the route to further cognitive encounters rather than a complete retreat into description.

What may be further suggested is that description is as unfree from the violences inherent in representation as experimentation might be.

notice on readings

Dear all,

This is to let you know that we have started a google groups where I will be uploading files, readings, and pages. The current web address is http://groups.google.co.in/group/on-knowing-how and email address is on-knowing-how@googlegroups.com
Those interested in accessing the group are invited to visit. Please note that for reasons of management, I will be inviting you to keep your discussions on this blog itself, and am using the google groups only to upload files and pages ...

session 2

The session began with a short recap of the 3 debates that came up in session 1 – namely the deployment of the metaphor of production for knowledge and their subsequent implications in the activity of the social sciences and philosophy, the debate between the “two cultures” of natural and social sciences and their legacy in colonial education, and the apparent choice between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as an approach to problem-solving.

Session 2 continued the theme of a certain ‘loss’ of the bold possibilities in knowledge production in the separation between natural and social sciences and the ascription of explanation to one side and methodology to the other. The argument made also rested on a certain separation of knowledge and disciplinary knowledge, that streamlines, narrows down, segments. Prof. Rajan Gurukkal began the session with a brief to make a survey of the segmentation of knowledge as a corpus into specific disciplines. Interdisciplinarity can come only later, it is feasible only at a certain stage of knowledge production; it is not a place to begin from. This also means that you cannot really make a choice between the two – disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as a preferred approach to problem-solving. The researcher, averred Prof. Gurukkal, will have to undergo the anchoring, the rigor, as also the suffocation of disciplinarity before anything like interdisciplinarity can come up. We could therefore look at the somewhat ‘spontaneous’ process where this takes place in the history of disciplines. In history we may see the augmentation of knowledge as philosophy and its segmentation as disciplines. Knowledge-production not segmented into areas may be seen as a more or less neuro-biological process. At some point, however, self-reflexivity sets in, so that the researcher is able to perceive herself as engaged in the production of knowledge. The history of knowledge production therefore is to be understood as the history of human biology as well as human society. We start from an already late point, where disciplines are already heading toward their constitution. Augmentation of knowledge has already taken place, called philosophy. We could, for example, go back to Hellenic, or Chinese or Indian civilization. In Greece, philosophy designated knowledge as generated around objects in nature and life, consisting of theology and metaphysics, and was broadly, in the classical Hellenic world, classified into natural and moral philosophy. In order to manage the corpus of knowledge and make it amenable to retrieval, classification began. At some point, theology, metaphysics, eschatology, were all treated as constituents of philosophy. At some point, more defined areas were ordained as disciplines. Discipline is knowledge disciplined with specified boundaries, as part of a determinate pattern of organization and classification of human thought around particular phenomena in nature or culture. This is a conscious effort. Knowledge is consciously constituted [and here we might recall the discussion around production of knowledge raised in session 1]. The structure is owed to a system of organization of human thought, that we cannot identify as biological, because subsequently we find other systems of organization of human thought. This might be immanent in the psychic process. This classification is a process of segmentation. Augmentation is natural, what is intellectualized and culturalised is segmented. This can go on to the formation of sub-disciplines too. Prof. Gurukkal went on to look at the birth of disciplines which, he said, could be understood in the context of the constitution of science based on Newtonian physics. This was a domain as understood separate from theology, metaphysics, and philosophy. This was the 17th century. Newton was the first to define science in a distinct manner. Science in European languages only meant knowledge; but Newton gave a contingent meaning to it. He made a distinction between knowable and non-knowable. He distinguished knowledge relating to fundamental laws or principles as ultimate knowledge. This ‘how’ is what he talked about rather than the ‘what’, or the ontology of the phenomenon. This changed fundamentally the pattern of human thought and the process of production of knowledge in European. In the East, axiomatic knowledge had become petrified; only extraordinary people could craft knowledge, and it was a separate kind than axiomatic. In Europe, however, knowledge became transparent, impersonal, and open, independent of the knower. This made Newtonian science different. This did not take place in other civilizations. The Acharya-Brahmachari relationship was different, from the scientist-student relationship. The latter was highly transparent, the former a charismatic one. The latter was a dialectical process of intellectual exchange, the former did not claim new knowledge, but in the process of reinterpretation new knowledge was sometimes produced. Europe was somehow able to overcome this culturally contingent factor owing to their mode of production of knowledge – formalized institutionalized laboratory settings, instrumentalisation … each scientist becoming a technologist, and technology gradually becoming an autonomous domain …

Every aspect of knowledge of human life found itself placed in the Newtonian framework. Comte’s impulse to talk about a science of society is a case in point. Comte anticipated a period where social knowledge would become very close to physics. Later scientists themselves began withdrawing from the possibility of complete predictability.

The very idea of the constitution of a discipline was however mooted by physics. Each area then distinguished itself as specialized knowledge around an object. So each area got constituted as a discipline. In the age that followed the Newtonian ethos, the 18th century, is called the Age of Enlightenment, methodological strategies were sought to critically revisit established truths. Several versions of the truth were sought. The challenge was to have a version intimate to Absolute truth. It was suggested that truth was at a distance, and social truth, for instance, was caused by it, while not being identical with it. The process of negotiating to arrive at this, was called methodology. Scientists were only concerned with manageable truth, so were not obsessed with methodology. This methodological obsession was one of the causes for distinct separation of disciplines. The broad separation between natural and social sciences, then, was becoming clear – the former studying natural reality, objectively, and the other – relying on imagination, creativity, talking about existence, sometimes transcendence. On the one hand, the social sciences might look like the natural sciences in their attempt to be objective, sometimes not. The lines were sometimes parallel, often diverging. Prof. Gurukkal went on to discuss some of the pre-texts for the coming of sociology and anthropology by way of example – like the work of Montesquieu or Miller, Malthus or Adam Smith – work which did not worry about the distance with physics in this kind of theorising. The distinction between common-sensical knowledge and specialized knowledge was however kept alive. With the coming of Comte and Positivism, distinctions between disciplines became more rigorous. This was the time of a methodological struggle for inclusion in science among these fields of knowledge as well as a struggle for methodological exclusivity … explains the proliferation of disciplines. This ‘positivist’ production of social knowledge not only made it more shallow, but increased the distance from physics. The response was – more methodology, more exclusive methodology. So each discipline became a compendium of knowledge based on methodologically sustained theoretical explanation. This was true of the state of social sciences during the Enlightenment, but they identified themselves only as philosophy during this time. In the early debates prior to discipline formation, there was no attempt to equate the knowledge produced to physics. But later, the insistence on application of scientific methodology to non-science disciplines gave rise to the positivist mode of applying Newtonian principles to Cartesian reason, emphasizing the particular rather than the general, the observable rather than the principle, and experience rather than rational speculation, pushing everything down to knowledge as empirically given. There was no longer a role for intuition for which there had been a place in Newtonian science. Science, which occupied the space between empirical givens and pure reason can be communicated through mathematics. Science cannot be reduced to the empirically given, but positivist misunderstandings of this gave rise to the continued shallowness of knowledge produced during that time. Prof. Gurukkal went on to make a fairly polemical statement about a fraternal relationship between post-structuralism and positivism in this light, where micro-theory is valorized, positions are not taken, and the search for truth sought to be undermined. In the distinction between social sciences and natural sciences, however, and especially in his indictment of micro-theory as the ‘only’ thing to do, Prof. Gurukkal made an insightful observation into the descriptive nature of micro-theory that fails to provide either tools or material for analysis. He therefore made a clear distinction between narrative social science and nomothetic or theoretical social science, where one is knowledge representation as a shadow of the original, and the latter is knowledge production through a cognitive encounter, asking for a return to the latter.

The next part of the session went on to look at the structure of disciplines within which knowledge is produced. When several disciplines are put together around the same object, knowledge diverges. This is what we experience in the context of discipline learning, so that there is no meaningful dialogue between disciplines owing to the insularity of knowledge generated. Multi-disciplinary understandings, therefore, are the same as disciplinary; it is just a putting together. What then is interdisciplinary knowledge? It consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one. It should be distinguished from multi-disciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity attracts a paradigm shift, whereas multi-disciplinarity goes very well with the idea of disciplinary knowledge. Interdisciplinarity does not quarrel with established disciplines; rather, it starts from the object of knowledge, analysis of the object helps convergence of the knowledge available in various disciplines for analytical comprehension. The example of water was dwelt upon in some detail to make this point – its ontology, its chemical representation, its stated as a contested natural resource rather than a natural object, its importance as an issue. It is important to approach an object not sanctioned by any of the disciplines, and then proceed with the art or science of knowing … so from divergence to convergence is the process of interdisciplinary study.

Prof. Gurukkal would place interdisciplinarity, understood this way, above disciplinarity. Intra-disciplinarity is a step ahead of disciplinarity as possible within the discipline. Trans-disciplinarity is the step toward interdisciplinarity. One is narrowing, the other widening, one divergent the other convergent, one atomistic the other holistic, one is centering, the other decentering, one is excluding, the other inclusive. Through interdisciplinarity one is able to influence the progress of one’s own discipline. An epistemological critique of one’s own discipline then becomes possible. In this process, “disciplinary” methodology or theory will face collapse. Relevant knowledge is thus produced.

Questions raised in discussion included rumination on the historical reasons why the social sciences seemed to carry the burden of descriptive or narrative work more than theory as seemed to have been suggested; whether interdisciplinarity is ‘natural’ to human beings and what would be ways to exercise it in teaching; whether there were already disciplines that started out as interdisciplinary; whether the work of interdisciplinarity included work that needed to be ‘done’ rather than thought upon; clarifications on why post-structuralism might be suggested as the ‘elder brother’ of positivism.

A note here. It might be useful to recall that the descriptive pressure in many social science disciplines today at the cost of the analytic, has to do with the ‘withdrawal’ that was suggested in the first session – the ‘moral’ pressure, as it were, to not represent, because representation would be ex-officio violent, exclusive. This has ended in a paralysis of understanding, and it is this paralysis, this loss of the boldness of knowledge-making, that was being pointed to, rather than a comfortable two cultures divide where one is inherently superior to the other. As mentioned in the last session, a deeply reflexive account. At any rate, it is interesting to see this movement in the social sciences – as a step away from apologia, as a possible return to boldness.

In conclusion, it might be suggested that one of the learnings from this session might be not to confuse criticism with critique, and to steer clear of that impulse in disciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, as understood here, might perhaps be the starting impulse that makes this clarity possible. This suggestion is of course open to debate.

A few thoughts at the outset of course 2010, and the inaugural Session 1

   As those who have been following this course since its 2006 edition might agree, there is much that is different in the course as taught in 2006 and 2008. 2006 was a multi-instructor course, 2008 was largely anchored by a single instructor. 2006 engaged in thematic debates across the disciplines in the natural and social sciences, 2008 was an intense engagement with the socio-cultural and intellectual contexts of knowledge production in the disciplines as we know them. In trying to share a rationale for the nature of the course in 2010 - and it must be said that some of the rationale is retrospective - it might be useful to remember that while the 2006 course introduced, for the first time, interdisciplinarity in a different sense from that already in circulation, pitching it differently from even multi-disciplinarity for instance, it also created a need - for clarity on concepts like objectivity, context, or perspectives of knowledge-production. And when it visibilised the classical "two-cultures" opposition in the classroom, rather than any classroom integration that might have been dreamed of, it threw up another question - of the question of diversity in science education. One way of attending to diversity would be to pay attention to the socio-cultural contexts from which would-be knowers come. Another is to pay attention to the diversity of ways of knowing, and to how they compete for validity. This was a question that perhaps has informed our efforts to take this course 'forward'; at any rate, it has created a desire to see interdisciplinarity as not really a way to hear about novel objects of enquiry ("oh, films are topics of research?!" or "crickets? what use is it to study crickets?") but as a dialogue between methodologies, as a way of drawing methodological insights from other fields that study the same or related objects, methodologies that challenge one's own, and of using that challenge to re-draw the face of one's own field or discipline. If need be. As mentioned in the concept note, therefore, the philosophy of the course has moved, since 2006, from trying to break down canonical disciplinary walls, valuing dissent and defection from disciplines as a source of criticality, to a sense that changing how one’s own discipline is done is perhaps the useful task of interdisciplinarity.
   All of this was in the air as we went into the inaugural session of the course 2010 on August 7, 2010, at the CCS Seminar Hall. Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar, welcoming old and new faces to CCS, said as much, before he went on to briefly introduce CCS activities to the newcomers to the Centre, and to talk briefly about the history of this course since 2006. 
   Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana of CSCS spoke in some more detail of the contexts of the CCS-CSCS collaboration and the inception of the course in 2006, bringing up the "two cultures" thesis discussed first and most famously by C.P.Snow in 1959 at Cambridge University, insightfully reminding us that the "controversy he initiated, rather than the questions he asked", is what has stayed with us, and wondered why that was so. "Had he formulated a question of great importance for our modern age? Or had he merely articulated, openly, what was implicit in our engagements with different forms of knowledge?" Teju went on to discuss Snow's thesis in some detail, as also the contexts of British society within which it was articulated. She also discussed the contexts within which the word science came to its present meanings, as also being part of a whole complex of other words - like art, nature, experience-experiment that underwent changes too, and the ways in which the separation of science as applicable to the study of the external world as different from the subjective. This separation also pervaded education, naturally, reflected in the specialization of higher education which became an earlier and earlier component of the education system. The business of the course, she hoped, would be to challenge this divide, especially in the current climate of interdisciplinary enquiry. It is not about having access to the same body of knowledge or knowing the same things, but be able to understand what the other is saying, to sustain a mutually intelligible debate.
   Prof. Sanjay Biswas, invited to formally inaugurate course 2010, shared with the group the dynamics of disciplinarity vs. interdisciplinarity, gleaned from his experiences of being closely associated with an interdisciplinary initiative, and the second an undergraduate program, both at IISc. Drawing a narrative of sorts of the shift from disciplinarity to interdisciplinarity, Prof. Biswas spoke of disciplinary knowledge as traditionally the space, related to capitalism, where industrial products were born. A large number of parallel streams somehow come together, 'integrate', to generate a product.This scheme of disciplinarity - the disciplinary approach to problems - ran into major trouble with the crisis of overproduction. The problems we addressed a hundred years ago are nowhere like the problems we have on our hands today - problems born out of this very overproduction - climate change is one. This got us seriously thinking about interdisciplinarity. Disciplines can no longer be juxtaposed as earlier, but in some way interdigitised, for these problems to be addressed. In reflecting on the experiences of setting up a biomedical clinical engineering centre, he told us how the target has shifted from a product to a problem. If we re-orient our approach to problem solving, it takes us away from the earlier disciplines in delivering the social good that capitalism wanted. This, then, was a difference from an earlier concept of integration. The problem itself is formulated by a group. Now what are the kinds of people we need for this kind of work - disciplinary, or interdisciplinary? Should such training start at school level - interdisciplinary to start with, or should it start with their own disciplines? What is the kind of training that will help the process of production as well. Is there a culture of knowledge holding that promotes both these kinds of activities? This problem Prof. Biswas offered up for debate.
   The inaugural session ended with Prof. Gadagkar talking about the structure of the course - 3 hrs. every Saturday, at 2 PM, for about 20 weeks. Each session will partly be a stand-alone module, and will be advertised separately.
    
SESSION 1A - Integrating Higher Education: Thinking Beyond the Disciplines

   Teju, who has been part of the inception of this course since 2006, began by wishing to lay out the history of the present state of higher education. This is a history of the present, so it is more about legacies. Referring to the usage of the word "predicament" in both the session descriptions, she began by asking for the reasons why higher education might be unpleasantly difficult, perplexing, and even dangerous. The higher education system in India, which began taking shape in the early to mid-nineteenth century, inherits the legacy of colonial proposals and policies of that time, most infamously the minute by Thomas Babbington Macaulay in 1835, which in turn drew on Charles Grant's work in 1797, when he spoke of the diffusion of Western knowledge in India, and the need for redemption of Indian cultural practices through Christian values and knowledge mediated through it. At that time, the East India Company, wary of tampering with the customs of the land, dismissed this proposal. It was later, when the Company became a major political power, that it turned its attention to introducing and consolidating educational initiatives. This would be around the 1820s. This time saw a very interesting 'collaboration' between the Utilitarians and the Evangelicals - those interested in secular knowledge, and those interested in propagating western moral values - for this purpose. Bentinck, the Governor General, supported Macaulay's proposal, and the result of course was a long-drawn out controversy. There were from this time also several attempts to introduce 
vernacular education, but with a deep ambivalence on the why and how of this, it failed to take off. A certain distinction was established between Oriental knowledge and modern knowledge - a legacy which has consequences even today. Does then the inability of the present education system to deal with the problem of educational resources in Indian languages have to do with this complicated history? A comprehensive education plan was put together in 1854 for the British Indian territory. This carried the stamp of Dalhousie, the then Governor General. This despatch proposed English education - "the improved arts, science, and literature of Europe" - for giving Indians access to the general effects of the diffusion of "useful knowledge". It has been pointed out in economic and social histories that underlying this was a desire to transform the tastes, interests and ambitions of Indian people. The despatch also emphasized the importance of vernacular languages in the diffusion of European knowledge. In 1857, affiliating universities were established - in Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, built on the model of London. Career opportunities in the government made sure students went for English education. So contrary to the 1854 despatch, after middle school there was no vernacular language instruction. So some of the dilemmas we face today were also dilemmas in the 19th century, with different reasons. Large numbers of private universities came up in the late 19th century; as early as 1877, commentators in Bengal talked about rising unemployment among Indians, which they saw as grist to political agitation; and further saw that literature and philosophy education hardly made for good training for government jobs. Law, teaching, journalism, medicine, which were independent professions, some turned to. In 1899, Lord Curzon lamented the failure of higher education, and its unsuitability for the jobs that were on offer. Reforms were called for. The Indian Universities Act was formulated in 1905, which seemed to increase the British stranglehold since all universities needed British university accreditation. This angered nationalists who had started institutions of their own. A debate now ensued on what might be the content of a national education as opposed to Western. Between 1912 and 1929, semi-autonomous modes of governance were experimented with. Educational institutions were classified as per the government funding them. Both British and nationalists introduced reforms; the INC requested Prof. Zakir Hussain of Jamia Milia to prepare a report on the feasibility of a national education system. The idea however took off only after independence.
   One thing about the Indian education system is that it is massive - the second largest in the world. Teju went on to discussing the structure of the system as of now - the college, the university, the research institute, resulting in a divorce of research and teaching after the important functions of higher education have been broken up in such a way that they do not speak to one another. Apart from these, there are deep disciplinary divides, that stem from the old separations of skill based learning from general education. It is already evident in the medical, architectural, and engineering colleges. The University Commission Report of 1948 headed by S. Radhakrishnan, proposes a distinction between fact, event, value - or nature, society, and spirit, the subject matter of sciences, social sciences, and humanities respectively. General education was as training for citizenship. This emphasis shifted to education for development of the nation. These divisions did not dissolve, except for the new emphasis on vocationalization in the Rajiv Gandhi years. This was proposed as a late antidote to the colonial emphasis on the arts. The Birla-Ambani report in 2000 renewed this plea with an emphasis on technical knowledge and managerial competence - to create a new information society. Important here is the collapse of information and knowledge. This gave a new meaning to "useful knowledge".
   Recent evaluations of social sciences present a story of decline. The knowledge is derivative, curricula outdated, teaching methods poor, resource materials few.
   Teju went on to suggest that these narratives of decline don't really account for the problem. The contours of this problem are related to the ways in which we are attracted to what we call "modernity". In order to understand how we understand modernity in India, we also need to understand how we understand culture. Our discussion of culture is located in third world nationalism. Culture then becomes the antithesis and the refuge from modernity. The key way to do this is to speak about and to fix Indianness. Education becomes a crucial site for the invocation of culture and Indianness. Peculiarly again, educational institutions are ill-equipped to deal with this.
   One of these sites is perhaps language, where these problems erupt. Regional language education is something that is constantly deferred. Disciplinary vocabularies fail to be instituted among students who sit examinations in the local language, and learn in English - there are few or no resources in their own languages.
   By 2006, it was suggested that major translation activity be put in to solve this problem. Teju suggested this was a displacement of the real problem. Local linguistic resources might give a very different picture of the complexity of social phenomena in our own contexts, and about developing a different language that helps talk about this. There are also the problems with inherited definitions of what constitutes useful knowledge, social science research and writing. The Higher Education Cell has been trying to feed projects that look at a range of writing in different languages that might give a different picture of social phenomena, and constitute new resources. We might juxtapose these kinds of writing alongside more recognizable social science research, to translate into both  regional languages and English, with the hope that a new generation will learn to draw on each of these for a critical vocabulary. This is about social science writing. Science writing may have generated a common vocabulary. But recent reports show a language problem in the sciences as well. We perhaps need a social theory and practice that can contend with the "relentless monolingualism" of the English text books. We also need to think of the status of translation as an activity, as a metaphor.
   We do need to evolve strategies for bilingual competence. Translator and teacher training is necessary. Repositories of regional language resources are being developed. This might make the learning process more coherent. But we cannot defer the question of what sort of university we need, and what sort of account of the language question such an institution should function with. A theory of the university today cannot be separated from a theory of language, and of translation. We might bring in the notion of a critical bilinguality. This approach to language in a multilingual and postcolonial society is a new approach to understanding the constraints and futures of institutions of higher education. Maybe this is a question for the natural scientists as well.

SESSION 1B: THE VERY IDEA OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

Prof. Sanil's was a very different kind of reflection on knowledge production. He sought to dwell on the meaning of production. Prof. Sanil began by talking about the "natural science-social science" hyphen, which seemed to be discussed always at the level of the individual - so the well-rounded natural scientist was one who also understood social problems. This model has not in a way been convincing. The question is - at the level of knowledge, can there be a meeting point? If it has not happened, it is not because policy makers or individual academics are not careful; there are genuine difficulties here. It is important to have a sense of that difficulty, and this is at the level of the idea of knowledge that we have, and the way we conceive the position of knowledge in our lives. Does this mean we will propose a new conception of knowledge under which integration will look possible? No. What Sanil did propose is that the intellectual labour given into bringing them together is the same that finally makes it impossible. That labour we might locate in the concept of "production". What do we really mean when we say that knowledge is a matter of production? Is this concept adequate for us to think about integration? There are two classical notions of integration - one is by Whitehead, who says - Get your religion into your physics, and your physics into your religion - a little frightening ... the other is the great Keats - "Beauty is truth and truth beauty ... " .. it is a great dream ... but is that all it is perhaps? Sanil suggested that something happened in the way we looked at knowledge in the 18th-19th centuries .. which is the source of this division, and our burden. We have been able to convince the natural scientists that they should study social sciences. Has the reverse happened? The sense is that natural scientists have produced knowledge, but do not understand some hidden meaning of knowledge.This is the problem we need to look at.
   So if we look at the classical definition of knowledge - as justified, true belief - which is not adequate, but a starting point in thinking about tradition of ideas of knowledge ... and then, knowledge is actually a mirroring activity; we have reality, we produce an exact representation of a copy of reality. This is a creative process. Another aspect of this mode of thinking of knowledge ... there is the method for knowledge ... is available in great thinkers like Descartes ... now, scientists do not reflect on method ... In the 18th-19th century, there was a shift ... toward methodological reflection in philosophy ... earlier, philosophers created 'scientific knowledge' too, but this underwent a change ... this was what brought the break ... earlier, Descartes could use the concept of knowledge to know the absolute necessity of one entity ... this became a question of contingency later on. We philosophers, said Sanil, do not make the claim to knowledge any more. What prevents us? When we were making the claim, say in Descartes' time, they could actually pursue things like mathematics. Suddenly this claim cannot be made ... the Copernican revolution in philosophy has happened .. there was instead the claim that we need to change the way we look at knowledge ... much in Copernican ways ... one of the cornerstones of this shift was to say that knowledge is not an imitation of reality ... knowledge does not give me any clue to that reality ... that entity itself I have no idea of ... to put it differently, knowledge has its own route, but whether it has any foundation anywhere, I have no way of knowing. Knowledge has internal constraints ... there are invariants to knowledge ... but it has certain rules ... this makes sense only if we say that knowledge is something we produce ... not imposed from the outside ... this is the move through which we get to the idea of production of knowledge ... Kant would tell us that the externalities impinging on me, that I seek to mirror, are already represented through a conceptual structure ... the outside world is not merely causing my knowledge ... it only justifies my knowledge ... experience has some internal structure ... Kant's own formulation would be - "the a-priori conditions of possible experience in general ... are the things ... the condition of possibility of the object of experience" ... I can think about the object, I cannot know it ... the moment I know it, it has an identity card - which refers to the 'production' ... any reality-in-itself is not an object of knowledge ... what concerns us is a reality for us ... we cannot go about the world which is beyond our relation to the world ... what is the faculty that will do this? This is where Kant suggested imagination ... which now acquires a prominent role in production ... this has primacy over perception ... and the relation, the tying together with the object, has to happen for perception to take place ... Sanil gave on to give examples of this ... this is then the radical claim - our non-active perceptions are alive in our present perceptions ... in the social sciences we sometimes tend to say that if knowledge were valuable it should have occurred naturally ... the fact that it was produced reduces its value ... this claim we are trying to undermine ... are we social scientists then wrong? what is it we are complaining of when we say "production"? what we say when we say we are only going to talk about production ... we can start by saying we cannot know what the thing-in-itself is ... what reality is ... what about the relator? what we call the absolute is the relation .. we cannot get out of this relation ... what we call the absolute is nothing but this relation ... we have only this opening ... for Hegel, absolute knowledge means we can only know the invariant of this knowledge, there is no need of a split .. this is the only way ... another position would say there are invariants ... like space and time ... why these? why is causality an invariant of my natural knowledge? this position would say I cannot know that ... that it only happens to be so ... the second position would say .. these categories can be deduced - like Hegel would put it ... a third tries to radicalize this further - like contemporary sociology of knowledge ... necessity of invariants cannot be proved ... it just so happens that these are born as contingent ... they are inescapable ... this inescapability is the ground of we knowing anything ... so we started with the question of knowing reality, and have withdrawn to this point ... only the relationship matters, then to say the invariance of the relationship ... then we say that what we have is the absolute contingency of this invariance ... as we make the more and more radical claim, we withdraw more and more ... so the concept of imagination as part of production which is the bold gesture of natural sciences in their engagement with reality, turns into a withdrawal for the social sciences which have their route in this grand withdrawal ...it could have been said that it is not the world that is mystical, but that there is a world ... we then must ask how we reached a position where the sheer world is such a mystery for us ... it shows how radically we are disconnected from cognitive activity ... this is what Foucault put out so well when he speaks of the positivity of 'man' ...these are our critical resources when we talk about intersubjectivity, ideology, power ... but on the other hand we might be moving away from a certain radicalism ... we have now shifted to language in the social sciences ... we will not now enquire whether nature is written in language, but only concentrate on language ... but can we turn positivism, dogmatic objectivity, into our resources, rather than rejecting science and scientists? We can take forward this dialogue only if we can say a few things about science, mathematics, and so on ... can we have a movement from the critical to the speculative in social sciences?

After that stimulating and eloquent laying down of those vulnerabilities on the table, questions were many and varied. They were questions - both clarificatory and polemical - on Oriental knowledge, distinctions if any between Western and European knowledge, the theory-ladenness of experience, useful knowledge, "production", the implications of the notion for the separation between natural and social sciences, the politics of translation, the debate around culture, the tradition-modernity debate, alternative imaginations of education in nationalist or other spheres. It was reiterated, in these clarifications by speakers, that higher education, for instance, is a recent concept. They also went on to conjecture that there is no parallel production of knowledge here, but the social sciences are an effect of the going about around the metaphor of production. So both are in the predicament ... there is a certain set of tools to understand what we are doing ... the natural sciences, too, in their idea of thinking knowledge is a cumulative activity ... we need to ask ourselves where we are, having given up old notions ... having stepped away from the notion of mirroring, we have demonstrated that knowledge-making is a free activity ... we cannot now say that knowledge-making is not free - of biases etc. etc. ... clarifications were also offered on critical bilinguality as not only a literal linguistic exercise but also one required across knowledge fields ... and on the diverse and changing component of the student population ... and the different kinds of politics required to respond to this ... communication may not be happening across fields not merely in absence of language skills but because there is nothing to communicate ... 

Note: It is the case that this set of suggestions are a deeply reflexive account of knowledge production, as also of the natural and social sciences, rather than a 'true' history, and are therefore best engaged with reflexively from other standpoints as well.

note on upcoming schedules

While details of individual Saturday lectures in the course will be put up closer to the time, here is a tentative list of the speakers for the entire course -

7 August  Tejaswini Niranjana, Senior Fellow, CSCS
Sanil V., Prof., HSS, IIT Delhi,
14 August  Rajan Gurukkal, VC, MG University, Kottayam
21 August  Raghavendra Gadagkar, Chairman, CCS
28 August  Rajeev Bhargava, Director, CSDS

4 September Christoph Moeller, Faculty of Law, Humboldt University, Berlin - POSTPONED
11 September    Deepak Kumar, Professor, Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, JNU
18 September    Michel Chaouli, Director, Institute of German Studies, Bloomington, USA
25 September    Vidita Vaidya, Reader, Department of Biological Sciences, TIFR, Mumbai
Amita Chatterjee, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University

2 October    Amie Parry, Professor, Department of English, National Central University, Chung-Li, Taiwan
9 October    S.V.Srinivas, Fellow, CSCS, Bangalore

16 October   Barrett Klein, Section of Integrative Biology, University of Texas, Austin
23 October   Madhulika Banerjee, Reader, Department of Political Science, Delhi University
Asha Achuthan, Faculty Consultant, CCS, IISc
30 October    H.N. Chanakya, Principal Research Scientist, Centre for Sustainable Technologies, IISc, N.S. Anuradha, Management Studies, IISc

13 November    Sanil V., IIT Delhi
20 November    Gita Chadha, Research Centre for Women's Studies, SNDT University, Mumbai
Chayanika Shah, Visiting Faculty, TISS, Mumbai
27 November    Rajesh Kasturirangan, Associate Professor, School of Humanities
Anup Dhar, Fellow, CSCS, Bangalore
   
 11 December Luca Giuliani, RectorWissenschaftskolleg zu BerlinInstitute for Advanced Study, Berlin
18 December    Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Leeds, UK   
23 December    Helga Nowonty, WWTF - Vienna Science and Technology Fund, Austria